UN & EU’s shame & shambles feed mediocre MSM rambles & language games

As readers may have noticed, I have rarely been favourably impressed with the output of any of the arms, elbows, hands, fingers etc. of the United Nations (UN) and its ever-expanding multiplicity of self-glorifying bodies – nor with that of its closely aligned partner in power-grabbing and propaganda par excellence, the European Union (EU).

Furthermore, for the past forty years, the inanities of “political correctness” have increasingly affected and infected far too many of our once valued institutions and organizations: From our respective governmental organizations to our long-standing once-upon-a-time respected and known Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) – as well as to far too many relatively unknown newbie NGO nobodies. The latter of which – if they are not just crawling out of a designated hole created circa 2009 – seem to multiply faster than rabbits!

In UN and EU circles – not to mention those in North America, quite often led by the equally unaccountable but grandiosely named Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the US – ardent proponents engage in shameless self-promotion and ever-creeping, if not sweeping, insertion by (for all intents and purposes) publicly unexamined regulation. They have an unwarranted impact on the way that we citizens are increasingly obliged to conduct our daily lives.

The latter effect is – in no small measure – thanks to the parades, masquerades and/or tirades of a government-funded (sometimes directly, sometimes not) cadre of loudmouthed NGO representatives. Far too many of whom have the implicit or explicit backing of the increasingly mediocre arms, elbows, hands, fingers etc. of the UN and/or its ever-increasing army of “designated” and/or otherwise officially “approved” NGOs.

But let’s not underestimate the role of far too many pandering pundits, in the so-called mainstream media (MSM). By way of recent example, consider the (taxpayer funded and, by far too many appearances, quite possibly BBC-trained!) Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)’s hysteria regarding the very sad – but publicized to virtually instant “icon” – death by drowning of that poor little child from Syria. As I had written in response to their (updated) article:

CBC once again demonstrates how utterly biased and inadequate the “research” skills of its reporting army (and/or external news sources) really is.

If there isn’t an angle for which the Conservative Party (and/or Israel, another of CBC’s mindless favourite targets) can be blamed, their interest in the story is virtually non-existent.

Yes, this is a very sad story. But the blame really lies squarely at the feet of the honchos who run the perpetual “send us more money” UN’s various and sundry mediocre bureaucracies (with more than a little help from designated NGOs and “BIG” names of the PR hour) that have more interest in increasing and flaunting their self-appointed cachet than in actually taking action and doing good where it is sorely needed.

Shame on the CBC, [Liberal PM wannabe] Trudeau Jr, [NDP PM wannabe] Mulcair and their ill-informed acolytes for making such shallow hay of a very sad – but very, very far from “new” – crisis of the UN’s making and perpetuating.

Not to mention the current UN head honcho, Ban Ki-moon’s disgustingly diversionary call for a “private” pre UN-confab “High Level” gathering of approximately 40 selected heads of state (including the self-important, self-glorifying – but oh-so-destructive** on so many fronts – US President Obama) from the great and the good, later this month, to address … not this particular issue of the UN’s creation and perpetuation, but the “give us more billion$” manufactured and magnified matters of climate change/sustainable development.

** My perceptions are far from unique; but I believe they are shared by some whose voices deserve to be heard more widely.

For example, Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post [See: here and here] In the latter of these two articles, Glick observes:

We have arrived at the point where the consequences of the West’s intellectual disarmament at the hands of political correctness begins to have disastrous consequences in the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

President Obama has an ugly habit of goy-splaning Jewish values to Jews in an effort to push his political agenda. Now, if Judaism wasn’t so intimately, and destructively, chained to political liberalism in the United States, the president’s absurd reading of ‘Jewish values’ would almost certainly offend those who take faith, culture and security seriously.

And last, but certainly not least, another analyst who brings clarity to that which the MSM – for the most part – decidedly do not, is the Gatestone Institute‘s Douglas Murray. In a recent article, Murray brings several notes of much-needed reality, including:

The question of “what to do” [about the European migration crisis] remains politically toxic for any mainstream Western European politician. During the summer, British Prime Minister David Cameron passingly referred to the “swarm” of migrants at Calais. His political opponents immediately jumped on this and denounced his “offensive” language. What chance is there, however, of proposing the kind of bold thinking we will need to consider in Europe if we keep reducing our response to this crisis to a language game? [my bold -hro]

YMMV, but I’ll take the assessments of the above three observers over the pompous, shallow pronouncements of Canada’s Naomi Klein and/or Canada’s and the U.K.’s many media pundits any day!

While the CBC – for reasons perhaps best known only to the decision-makers at The Current – continues to milk the story of the “iconic” image I had noted above, Canadian Moslem writer, Tarek Fatah brings some welcome notes of reality via a column published in the Toronto Sun and the Middle East Forum.

Do read the whole thing. In the meantime here are some excerpts (my bold -hro):

Who is to Blame for the Drowning of Alan Kurdi?

A single photograph of a three-year old boy named Alan Kurdi, lying dead on a Turkish beach, has rocked the conscience of the world.

The picture will remain seared in our collective memory forever …
[…]
Despite what was initially reported by Canadian media, Alan Kurdi was never headed to Canada.

His aunt in Vancouver, Tima Kurdi, tried to sponsor Alan’s uncle and family under what is known as a “G5 privately sponsored application for asylum.” Citizenship Minister Chris Alexander personally took up her application after receiving it from Fin Donnelly, the MP for Port Moody-Coquitlam.

However, because the UN in its wisdom wouldn’t register the Kurdi family as refugees, and because the Turkish government wouldn’t grant them exit visas (as they didn’t have passports), the application for asylum in Canada couldn’t proceed any further.
[…]
With no legal options, the family did what tens of thousands of refugees in Turkey have done — they took a risky boat ride from Bodrum in a flotilla of dinghies headed for the Greek island of Kos. The boat capsized about 30 minutes after it set off. Alan, his brother Ghalib, 5, their mother Rehan, and many others drowned.
[…]
In essence, it’s the story of a Kurdish family that fled an Arab country after an Islamist attack and took refuge across the border in Turkey, a country known for its hostility towards its own Kurdish population. In the words of the boy’s aunt in Vancouver, the treatment of her family in Turkey was “horrible.”

Instead of targeting the most visible and apparent villains in this drama — the Assad regime in Syria, the Turks, ISIS, Saudi Arabia and Qatar — the Liberals and the NDP sharpened their knives and went after Alexander, the very man who has been quietly helping people escape tyranny and settle down in Canada.
[…]
Hadi Elis, spokesman for the Kurdish Community Centre of Toronto, told me he was shocked how Trudeau and an NDP MP from British Columbia used Alan’s tragic death to attack Alexander.

“Minister Alexander has been one of the strongest allies of the Kurdish community and stood by the Syrian Kurds in their darkest hour in Kobani from where the boy and his family fled in the face of attacks on them by Islamist ISIS and their Turkish allies,” Elis wrote in an e-mail.

“It is despicable for Liberal and NDP politicians to use the dead boy as a political tool to score partisan political points. Shame on them. They want Canada to stop attacking ISIS, and then shed crocodile tears when a victim of ISIS drowns on a Turkish beach,” he continued.

“If there is anyone who is guilty of this crime, it is Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and UN, all those who have refused to embrace hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing war, not Minister Chris Alexander who needs no lectures on compassion by politicians who are catering to the Islamists inside Canada.”
[…]
The fact is all these refugees fleeing war zones in the Arab World could very easily be accommodated in Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

Instead, while Turkey wants to dump them in the sea and hope bleeding-heart, guilt-ridden liberal Europeans embrace them and pay for their resettlement, the Saudis have an even simpler solution: Shut down the border and seal it so not a single Alan Kurdi dare walk across from Iraq or the new “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” into its territory. Period.
[…]

As I said, do read the whole thing. Because it’s highly unlikely that you’ll hear the whole story from the MSM and/or its carefully selected outside commentators.

P.S. I see that over at Bishop Hill, some members of the Congregation have drawn attention to a possibility I hadn’t even noticed regarding this iconic picture, including this one from jamesp:

[…] the photo of the hapless Syrian boy washed up on the beach in Turkey. His position at the exact edge of the water, and the absence of the usual flotsam around him, was just a little too tidy for comfort, leading to the uncomfortable thought that he had been cleaned up and ‘repositioned’ for the photo. No doubt the photographer will be rewarded for his scoop, but what about the surviving family?

You’re quite correct, Bruce. It was something at the back of my mind that I meant to check;but I obviously got distracted, somewhere along the way.

However – miracle of miracles – in the NYT of all MSM places, Nicholas Kristof not only spells the boy’s name correctly, but also gets most of the story with (most of) the emphases in all the right places, too (my bold -hro):

Aylan’s death reflected a systematic failure of world leadership, from Arab capitals to European ones, from Moscow to Washington. This failure occurred at three levels:

The Syrian civil war has dragged on for four years now, taking almost 200,000 lives, without serious efforts to stop the bombings […]

Driven by xenophobia and demagogy, some Europeans have done their best to stigmatize refugees and hamper their journeys. […]

Then there are the Persian Gulf countries. Amnesty International reports that Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates haven’t accepted a single Syrian refugee (although they have allowed Syrians to stay without formal refugee status) […]

We Americans may be tempted to pat ourselves on the back. But the U.S. has accepted only about 1,500 Syrian refugees since the war began, and the Obama administration has dropped the ball on Syria.
[…]

In any case, let’s be clear that the ultimate solution isn’t to resettle Syrians but to allow them to go home.

“Stopping the barrel bombs will save more refugees dying on the route to Europe than any other action, because people want to return to live in their homes,” noted Lina Sergie Attar, a Syrian-American writer and architect.

[…Kristof concludes:]

[T]he real atrocity isn’t the photo but the death itself — and our ongoing moral failure to save the lives of children like Aylan.

“The very strong indications are that the body of baby Hashim was uncovered early in the recovery effort by two Red Cross workers and subsequently re-buried so that it could be “discovered” by “Green Helmet” in a way that maximised the propaganda value.”

In the meantime, Aylan’s father has returned to Kobani and has buried his family, intending to remain there. He would not seem to have been arrested or attacked. I am not being insensitive, just puzzled.